Why We Love Ridley Scott Sci-Fi

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As we prepare for Prometheus, let's take a look back at the magic of Alien and Blade Runner.

By Scott Collura

For a filmmaker who's so closely associated with the science-fiction genre, Ridley Scott has had a surprisingly minimal output in the arena in terms of sheer numbers. Aside from his new Alien prequel Prometheus, which opens this weekend in the U.S., Scott has made just two feature-length sci-fi films -- Alien and Blade Runner. And those two masterpieces came out 33 and 30 years ago, respectively.

And yet, those films are masterpieces of the genre, and that's why Scott's return with Prometheus to spaceships and aliens and androids and planets named LV is so important. His contribution to and influence on the genre has been undeniable, and he ranks up there with Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg and Cameron in terms of shaping modern sci-fi.

What's so great, so memorable, so trendsetting, about Ridley Scott's genre work, you ask? Let us count the ways…

The Future Is You

The crew of the Nostromo, the space mining vessel featured in 1979's Alien, aren't a bunch of raygun blasting, big-headed nerds in spacesuits. No, they're just a group of seven working-class stiffs who are trying to make a buck when they have a most unfortunate run-in with a nasty bugger called a xenomorph.

Scott's films took the "outer" out of outer space. Ripley, Dallas, Deckard -- even Roy Batty -- are all people just trying to get through the day like the rest of us. When the Nostromo crew wakes up from hypersleep, the first thing they do is eat. Then they argue (over money). Then they go to work. (And argue some more.) When we meet Deckard, he's slurping down noodles and looking for a job. But as the now excised voice-over from the Blade Runner theatrical cut reminds us, they don't advertise for killers in the newspaper…

The Nostromo crew in happier days...

The point is, the characters in these films are fundamentally identifiable to us, the viewer. They're not heroes with great destines or magical powers. They're regular people placed in irregular situations, but we can understand who they are and what they're trying to do because, basically, they're us.

The Horror, the Noir

Alien and Blade Runner aren't just sci-fi films, but rather hybrids. In fact, Alien is really more of a horror film set in a sci-fi world (though I would argue that Blade Runner is the more fundamentally science-fiction outing, draped in film-noir trappings). And while mixing and matching genres was nothing new in 1979 or 1982, the skill with which Scott created his hybrid sci-fi -- and the successes that resulted -- remains mostly unparalleled to this day.

Alien works in this regard on a variety of levels -- traditional spook house, lurching-from-the-shadows scares mix with psychological horror as crew member after crew member is slowly picked off, and the survivors are powerless to do anything about it. And then there's the grisly element of body horror as the creature impregnates, gestates in, and is born from another crew member (totally ruining supper in the process). The imitations and sequels and prequels of Alien have streamed forth ever since.

In the case of Blade Runner, Harrison Ford's Deckard is a glum private dick living in a future-noir world… and, in fact, the term future noir can now be used to sum up this particular offshoot of sci-fi where the lights are neon, the skies are rainy, and the motivations of the characters are equally opaque. It's as if once we first glimpsed the skyscape of Los Angeles in November, 2019, audiences, and Hollywood as well, had finally "seen things you people wouldn't believe." Unraveling his case of robots run amok clue by clue, Deckard falls in love with that which he is hunting. Why didn't femme future fatale ever become a term? Speaking of which…